We’re four days from an election in which we will pick a new governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state. We’ll also choose a mostly new legislature, and determine which party controls the Michigan Supreme Court.

We’ll decide whether to have a constitutional convention, whether felons should be presented from holding office after they complete their terms, and decide a whole range of other offices. We’ll do all that Tuesday -- which is to say, a minority of us will. Unless Michigan defies a long-standing historical trend, fewer than half the eligible voters will vote in this election.

Looked at one way, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. We are facing a crisis of historic magnitude. The new governor and legislature will face a deficit approaching two billion dollars with no more stimulus money and absolutely no fat left in the state budget.

They can either raise taxes, which for today’s Republican Party pretty much amounts to a sacrilege, or they can slash funding to essential services, including higher education.

Everyone in either party who is well-informed knows that Michigan’s only hope is vastly increasing the education level of our workforce. Nobody can make decent living anymore with just a high school degree, and having a bachelor’s degree without a particular skill set isn’t worth much today either.

We’ve lost nearly a million jobs in this state, and kids are emerging into the bleakest job market since the Great Depression.

So, you’d think there would be great interest in this election, and in what competing solutions the candidates for governor were proposing to make life better for us all.

But the candidates, especially front-runner Rick Snyder, have gotten away with really not saying very much. We know that Snyder would replace the Michigan Business Tax with another tax that would add to the state’s deficit, at least in the short run.

We know that Virg Bernero is against outsourcing jobs to China, and that he’d start some form of state bank. But I haven’t much of a clue how either man would deal with the deficit.

They’ve been ducking questions, and the press has let them get away with it. Political coverage this year has been reduced to analyzing the campaign commercials, which range between totally false and largely irrelevant, and something even worse:

Obsession with the polls. Who is going to win? Is it too late for to close the gap? Whose negatives are up? Journalists who should be offering intelligent policy analysis instead sound like a bunch of characters around the betting window at a race track.

And what may be most disturbing is that the public doesn’t seem engaged either. To some extent, that’s surely because of the intellectual emptiness of this campaign.

But I’m afraid it is also because people have lost faith in the ability of politics and government to make a real difference in our lives. The men and women in Ann Arbor who half a century ago urged John F. Kennedy to start the Peace Corps were different.

They believed Kennedy when he said “one person can make a difference, and every person should try.” I’d feel a whole lot better if any of this year’s candidates made us feel that way too.

From time to time, I’ve watched televised political debates with regular people -- regular in the sense that they don’t eat, sleep and breathe politics. Much of the time, I’ve found the viewers weren’t satisfied with the questions the candidates were asked.

They felt that many of the things that they wanted to know weren’t being addressed. That may be truer than ever in this year’s Michigan gubernatorial race, for two reasons.

First of all, we don’t know either Virg Bernero or Rick Snyder very well. Most of us hadn’t heard of either a year ago, and have only a fuzzy image of them now. Second, they had only one debate.

A number of Michigan Radio’s listeners have been posting things that they’d like the candidates to answer, and for a change, instead of telling you what I think, let me tell you what some of the voters want to know.

If the candidates happen to hear their questions, I’d be thrilled if they’d give me some real answers, If they do, I’ll happily share them with everybody. So, first of all, a man named Nathaniel would like both candidates to tell him this: “What will you do to LOWER costs for higher education? What will you do to get more people in Michigan into college? What can we do to stop the brain drain,“ that has so many college graduates leaving the state?

Excellent questions, Nathaniel. He also asked this of both men: “Would you pay an extra penny in sales tax to save Michigan’s economy?” By that he meant a one percent regional sales tax to be collected in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, and used for a tri-county mass transit system. This, he argues, would bring in federal matching funds and result in five billion dollars in economic growth.

Peinck Muslimah wants both candidates to commit to a graduated income tax, which would require a state constitutional amendment. Shannon Jones wants to see if our current flat rate tax system can be made to work better instead.

So, which do the candidates prefer?

Another listener notes that there is a vast disparity in the size of of school districts in our state. He, like many education experts think that with more that 500 districts, Michigan has too many.

So he wants to ask the candidates: “Do you plan to consolidate municipal services and small school districts to save money and reduce corruption? If so, how and when?

Another listener doesn’t want to ask the candidates, he wants to tell them something: “Metro Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, Grand Rapdis and Kalamazoo need to come together as regions.”

That he thinks, would create new and larger government entities focused on solving economic and other problems.

Tom Williams thinks whoever gets elected should establish a new, user-friendly one-stop online shop for all economy-boosting services, and push for “an aggressive outreach campaign designed to encourage business to increase the state’s profile further.”

He also thinks if “jobs are indeed the number one issue, in the state“ they should be the singular focus in state government.”

My guess is that there are several hundred thousand unemployed Michiganders who might very much agree.

They are laying the governor to rest this afternoon, in a tiny park in Detroit located where his office once stood.

U.S. Senator Carl Levin is supposed to make some remarks, as are a host of other dignitaries. The governor won’t be able to hear them, of course, but I’d bet he would be amazed and gratified.

His life didn’t turn out the way he had hoped. His administration, which started so well, ended badly, with a financial panic, a banking crisis, and Michigan on the rocks.

His father had told him that a “poor broken-down politician was the most miserable of society’s creatures,“ adding that “even one honorably retiring is soon forgotten.”

Those are words Stevens T. Mason, Michigan’s first governor, came to appreciate too well. After two terms as Michigan’s first governor, his popularity was gone, and he was depressed and broke. He didn’t even try to run for re-election.

Instead, he fled the state, going to his wife’s native New York. He tried to build a law practice, but soon caught scarlet fever, or pneumonia, and died.

When he was buried in 1843, the boy governor was a mere thirty-one years old. As his father predicted, he was soon forgotten.

But not forever. Eventually, historians began to realize how much he had done. As a territorial governor barely out of his teens, he cleverly faced down fellow Democrat Andrew Jackson.

Mason did much to win statehood for Michigan. He caused the University of Michigan to be in Ann Arbor and the first state prison in Jackson; he pushed for development of a network of roads and canals and the newfangled railroads.

Eventually, in 1905, they disinterred his bones from a New York cemetery and brought them to Detroit, to tiny Capitol Park. They moved him again half a century later when a bus station was built.

This summer, they had to dig poor Stevens T. up again, when the park was completely renovated. To everyone‘s embarrassment, they couldn‘t find him for a couple days. They thought they might be looking for an urn with ashes. But in the end, they found a remarkably preserved steel casket. I had a glimpse inside.

Someone had lovingly stitched each bone to a mattress. He was tall for his day, the funeral director told me; a little over six feet in height. There was also a copper plate inside:
Stevens Thomson Mason; first governor of Michigan. Removed from New York to Detroit, June 4, 1905.

Donald Faber, a newspaper editor turned historian, is working on a new biography of Mason. He told me he was one of the best governors we’ve ever had. Michigan became a state because the young Mason fought the Toledo War and stood up to President Jackson, the most powerful figure of his age.

Next October will mark Governor Mason’s two hundredth birthday. My guess is that if he came back to life, he wouldn’t be at all surprised that his Democrats were in political trouble and his state in financial trouble again. I think he would also be astounded by today’s ceremony, and gratified that he is still remembered.

How would you like to read a fascinating new book that suddenly would make you more knowledgeable about our state than just about any of your friends?

Well, I’ve just done that, and I heartily recommend the book, which is much more interesting that it sounds. Michigan State University Press has just published Michigan’s Economic Future: A New Look, by economist Charles Ballard.

Don’t let the title put you off. Ballard is that rarest of creatures; a university economist who writes really well, the best, possibly, since John Kenneth Galbraith. He is a curious combination himself. Born in Midland, Michigan in the 1950s, he grew up largely in Texas.
But he ended up coming back in 1983 to teach at Michigan State, where he is now a full professor, and has stayed ever since.

If your idea of university economist is that of a dry, stuffy, elitist intellectual, think again. Ballard‘s own research is appropriately academic. But he is also a real person, who was raised in a Protestant church, doesn’t mind quoting Scripture where appropriate, and is not afraid of sounding a bit corny. For example, he loves our state song, Michigan, My Michigan, and encourages readers to sing it every chance they get. My last chance, I believe, was third grade.

This is, however, a serious and very important book. What it does is lay out clearly exactly what has happened to our economy, where we stand now, and why. Neither dogmatic liberals or conservatives are going to find everything here easy to take.

Ballard has done academic work that has centered around showing how much damage high rates of taxation can solve. He agrees with most Republicans that the Michigan Business Tax is terrible and ought to be completely done away with.

So long, that is, as we replace the revenue. Ballard demonstrates decisively that those who think we are overtaxed now have been sold a bill of goods. Michigan once did have tax rates slightly higher than the national average.

But now, our rate of taxation has fallen dramatically, our infrastructure is falling apart, and the tax burden is falling disproportionately on the lower middle class and poor.

More than ever, the biggest single factor determining how successful in life one will be is their education level. Yet Michigan, which has a badly undereducated workforce, has led the nation in cuts to education, especially higher education, in recent years.

What’s worse, test scores indicate we are allowing the quality of elementary and high school instruction to slip as well.

This makes no sense. But while this book presents a sobering view of our problems, the author is remarkably optimistic. He concludes, “I firmly believe that we can have a much brighter future, both in terms of the economy and in other ways.”

We’ve got a lot going for us, he notes, from our workforce to our waterways. However, he adds, “to get to that brighter future, we’ll have to do things differently,” which means making hard choices.

We’re facing an important election next week, and Charley Ballard‘s been thinking about that too. Economists are seldom completely certain about anything, but he is certain what the most important quality is that our future leaders should have.

Yesterday I moderated a discussion about what’s wrong with state government. The panel included two current state legislators -- Senator Gilda Jacobs and Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton, and one former state rep, David Gubow. He served for fourteen years before being forced out by term limits, and is now a district judge.

The three of them have a lot in common. All three are fairly liberal Democrats who live in an older Detroit suburb. Regardless of what you think of their politics, all are responsible and conscientious servants of the people, who have never been touched by scandal.

They also all agreed that our system of state government is broken, and headed for a day of reckoning, with all the stimulus money gone and next year’s huge state budget deficit looming ahead. Term limits have been a big part of this problem. Gubow, in fact, once said that term limits mean that in Michigan, the only people barred from serving in the legislature are convicted felons currently in prison -- and those who have earned the support of the voters.

They agreed on a number of other problems; our constitution is too easy to amend, and so questions that should be decided merely by passing a law are instead resolved by voters passing a constitutional amendment. Our constitution also forbids a graduated income tax, which means rich and poor pay the same tax rate.

Representative Lipton spoke of efforts to address the resulting unfairness with a complex system of tax credits. So complex, in fact, that when she explained this, I couldn’t understand it.

Eventually, one member of the audience asked a logical question. Eight days from now, the voters are going to be asked if they want to call a convention to fix the state constitution.

Since government is broken, were the panelists in favor of having a constitutional convention? Every one of them said no.

No, for one simple reason. They don’t trust the people. They didn’t use exactly those words, but that’s precisely what they meant. “Not in the present political climate,” Judge Gubow said. He feared that Tea Partiers might win a majority of the delegates and trample all over various rights and freedoms.

Representative Lipton said she had worked long and hard to make embryonic stem cell research possible, and feared that religious opponents might get elected delegates and write a new constitution that outlawed such scientific work.

Well, there is a safeguard, it was pointed out. No new constitution could take effect unless the voters ratified it.

If they wrote a turkey, we can vote it down. But it turns out none of the panelists trusted the people to do the right thing there, either.

Liberals are not, however, alone in this. Conservatives don’t trust the people either. The Michigan Chamber of Commerce and other groups are spending heavily to try to get them to vote no.

Their fears could have some merit. But I can’t help but think, what kind of democracy can you have if, at the end of the day, you fundamentally don’t trust the people?

Because if that’s the case, well, maybe we should have just stayed colonies of Great Britain after all.

October 22, 2010

Attention has been so focused on the elections that few have noticed that many workers will lose their unemployment benefits by the end of next month. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about them.

We’re less than two weeks away from statewide elections, and much of the media has been intently focused on who is going to win and lose on election night. What few are talking about, however, is a much larger group of people who are losing big-time, right now.

And now hundreds of thousands of Michiganders are coming to the end of their unemployment benefits. In normal times, people who lose their jobs are eligible to collect benefits for a maximum of twenty-six weeks, or six months. The most they can get is $362 dollars a week, out of which they have to pay federal taxes.

That amounts, by the way, to a gross income of just under nineteen thousand dollars a year. That’s considerably less, by the way, than it costs to keep somebody in prison.

Since times have been so bad, Congress has extended the eligibility period in hard-hit states like Michigan to a maximum of ninety-nine weeks for some workers, or just less than two years. But even that has proven not to be enough, in a world where there are eight and a half job seekers for every available job.

Now, a huge number of former workers are running out of time. According to the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency, 142,733 workers will lose their last benefits by November 30.

That’s pretty grim news, with the first chill of winter in the air. Things get worse from there. By the end of April, that number is expected to more than double, to more than 324,000.

The number of people affected by this is, of course, larger, since some of these folks are supporting families. The ripple effect on the already battered Michigan economy will be further devastating.

Those losing their final benefits, by the way, aren’t overwhelmingly in any one region of the state. Nearly half are in the tri-county Metropolitan Detroit area, but that’s close to that region’s share of the state’s population.

Eleven thousand workers in the county including Grand Rapids lose benefits; ten thousand in the Flint area. Senator Debbie Stabenow has introduced legislation further extending unemployment benefits. But its future is, at best, uncertain.

Whatever happens in the elections, the new Congress is expected to be more conservative than the old. While military spending remains high, there is growing concern about the ballooning federal deficit, now by far the largest in history.

But nobody seems to have devoted much thought to what is going to become of our state’s hundreds of thousands of hopelessly long-term unemployed. Congressman Gary Peters has introduced a sensible bill that would allow them to withdraw funds from their IRA retirement accounts without paying the usual penalty.

Unfortunately, it has been languishing in committee, as the wife of an unemployed former Chrysler worker told me yesterday.

Passing both bills would seem to be common sense -- especially from the standpoint of those who still have jobs.

Large deficits may make us uneasy. But I would think that the prospect of hundreds of thousands of desperate folks who lack money, jobs or hope ought to make us uneasier still.

The one thing everybody seems sure about in the current race for governor is that Rick Snyder is ahead in the polls. We don’t have any clear idea what he would do to balance the budget.

We’re not sure what he would do to give our universities the money they need to adequately educate the workforce Michigan needs. Actually, we’re not too sure how he stands on a broad range of issues, from privatization of the state’s workforce to the proposed internationally owned bridge across the Detroit River.

Nor is the state’s press corps working especially hard to find out. There are also many questions about Virg Bernero, his opponent, and what sort of policies he would adopt.

But we do know that Snyder is ahead by twenty percent in the polls. In fact, there is a new poll every few days that says much the same thing. This seems to be necessary so that Lansing pundits can pontificate on things like whether the Democrats should now put their money behind Secretary of State candidate Jocelyn Benson.

But is this what political reporting should be all about? True, reporting poll results is easier than trying to dig around to find out what the candidate would really do in office.

Or what his policies would really mean for our state. Since we’ve been telling voters over and over that this race is over, is there any wonder that people are apathetic about it?

More and more, I think the way we cover elections in this country is a disgrace. The only poll that counts occurs in voting booths on November. We’ve got an immense crisis in this state, and there are precisely two men who conceivably could be elected and face the task of trying to lead us out of this mess.

So, it would seem to me that we should concentrate more on who they are, what they would do, and what they are all about.

There are some people who do rise above this. I talked to one the other day. Jennifer is a 59-year-old woman who grew up in Ann Arbor, but never had the chance to go to college, because she had to help raise her siblings after her daddy died.

She’s highly intelligent, politically independent, and works several jobs, including that of a textbook buyer. Been married for more than thirty years; raised three sons; lives in the house her parents built. Her big political moment came a long time ago, when she was a Catholic schoolgirl, and the nuns lined up her class to shake hands with a candidate named John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

She and some friends watched the debate between the candidates for governor, and decided they’d vote for Virg Bernero. “I don’t know -- he just seemed more sincere. More like he had an idea what he wanted to do. The other one was sort of a corporate talker.“

Perhaps she is a complete anomaly. But I thought it was interesting that she felt that way. Besides knowing what the candidates stand for, it would be nice to hear more in this campaign about some real people, and what they think about it.

Last night I presided over a fascinating meeting in Grand Rapids, the second in Michigan Radio’s “Issues and Ale” series designed to stimulate public discussion.

The main event was a look at this year’s campaign advertising by two members of the “Michigan Truth Squad,” John Bebow, director of the non-partisan Center for Michigan, and Susan Demas, perhaps the best columnist in Lansing.

They are doing their best to analyze as many spots as possible and rate them on their truthfulness. You may not be surprised to learn that most of today’s ads bear only a passing relationship to reality.

In fact, Dr. Grins’ Comedy Club was the perfectly appropriate place for this. But what I found even more interesting than the truth squad were the questions from our large and very aware audience.

The very first question was extremely perceptive. A gentleman noted that Michigan was facing a huge budget crisis next year, and that whomever takes over as governor will inherit a deficit of at least $1.6 billion dollars. So how are they going to balance the budget?

What’s more, either Virg Bernero or Rick Snyder would immediately make that figure worse -- if they keep their promises. Bernero wants to get rid of the 22 percent surcharge on the Michigan Business Tax. That may be a good idea from the standpoint of attracting business, but would add to the state budget deficit.

Rick Snyder, the Republican, wants to abolish the Michigan Business tax entirely, and replace it with a six percent corporate income tax. That would make the deficit worse still.

The gentleman in Grand Rapids knew that the state budget has to be legally balanced by the end of next September. So, why isn’t either candidate telling us how they would manage that?

That’s the question we all should be asking them.

Both candidates are in fact fighting hard to avoid giving you an answer, and especially to avoid giving you an honest one.

That’s because they fear the truth will lose them votes. What they are going to have to do is either raise taxes or cut services drastically and dramatically raise the cost of things like college tuition. Most likely, they’ll have to do both.

The math is simple. There are no other choices, but they don’t want to tell us that. Once upon a time, we had great leaders who called on us to sacrifice for the common good.

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Working class Americans taxed themselves to better educate their children. Nowadays, politicians tell us any tax increase would be terrible. We tell them, “Keep cutting government, but don’t you dare give me any less than I get now.“

Something’s got to give. Nearly half a century ago, my unreformed fifth grade teacher made us learn simple math. If I got my times tables wrong, I was whacked with a ruler.

I haven’t the foggiest notion of what old Miss Hutson’s politics were. But I am sure that on hearing their fuzzy math, she would have taken the ruler to both Snyder and Bernero.

State Representative Robert Jones was an enormously popular former mayor of Kalamazoo who was in an intense battle to win a seat in the state senate. Intense, but not nasty.

Even in the present, bitter partisan atmosphere, people appeared to genuinely like Mr. Jones, who one friend described as the “guy with the curly little mustache and the huge smile.” Those people included his opponent, Republican Tonya Schuitmaker, who had a hard time saying anything bad about him.

But two days ago, Robert Jones suddenly died in his home, throwing the race into chaos and elections officials into a tizzy.

Legally, dead people’s names aren’t supposed to appear on the ballot. The ones that will be used two weeks from today can perhaps be reprinted, at what I imagine will be considerable expense.

But absentee ballots have gone out and, in some cases, already have been returned. What’s to be done about those?

The Democratic party has to scramble to name a new candidate, who then has to try to make her or his case to the voters in less than two weeks’ time.

Journalism is sometimes about telling unpleasant truths that nobody wants to hear, and here’s one of those. Tributes have been flooding in, praising Robert Jones as a lawmaker, friend and leader.

But the truth, as I see it, is that he had no business running for office this year. Jones had esophageal cancer; he had been fighting it for more than a year. I do not know for certain that this is what killed him, though two days before he died a friend said he appeared to be in pain, and that it was difficult for him to speak.

But he knew he was gravely ill. Being a state senator is a full-time job, and he had to have known that even in the best case scenario, fighting cancer would take up time and energy. Sadly, Robert Jones is far from alone.

Throughout history, candidates have campaigned, sometimes even when they were dying, sometimes going to great lengths to conceal their true condition from the voters.

When the late Paul Tsongas ran for president in 1992, he and his doctors repeatedly said he was cancer-free when it fact he was not. He did not win the Democratic nomination that year, but if he had been elected, he would have died in office during his first term.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a dying man when he was last elected president during World War II. Within three months, the leadership of the nation fell to a vice-president who had no preparation whatsoever for the enormous responsibilities of the job.

Fortunately, that turned out all right. But it wasn’t fair to the voters. In recent years, we’ve been treated to the spectacle of a senile Strom Thurmond and a dying Robert Byrd holding down seats in the U.S. senate. Public office requires responsibility to the public.

Robert Jones was a fine mayor, state representative, and man. But he did his district and his party a disservice by running for office when he was gravely ill. It’s not to much to ask that our elected leaders be honest with us, and be physically up to the job.

Thirty years ago, I worked for the publisher and owner of a family-owned newspaper in Ohio, a somewhat crotchety gentleman in his early seventies who I came to know pretty well.

He told me once that his general manager wanted to make a bunch of changes and layoffs that could double his profit margin.

He wasn’t having any of it. “We try to pay our people well, in good times and bad,” he told me. He was proud that he had never had to lay off workers. “This business isn’t about greed,“ he told me.

He was a millionaire, but one without extravagant tastes. If he got back an eight to ten percent return, that was good enough.

He’s been dead a long time now, and the publishing world has changed. Newspapers are in free fall, thanks to our changing lifestyle and the Internet. Most papers are now owned by large, publicly traded companies which are all about maximization of profits.

The result is being played out right now in Detroit. Twenty-five years ago, the News and Free Press were locked in the most competitive struggle in the nation. They circulated statewide, and together sold more than 1.3 million papers a day.

Today, they are shadows of their former selves. Their combined circulation is less than a third of what it was. They charge more for thinner papers with smaller staffs, and only offer home delivery two or three days a week.

The Gannett Company, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, owns the Free Press and effectively controls the News, thanks to a one-sided joint operating agreement. Gannett is doing well. Last week, it posted a thirty-seven percent increase in quarterly earnings.

Newspaper revenue was down, true, and most of the increase in profits were due to better broadcast and digital performance. But according to the Associated Press, revenue from Gannett’s eighty newspapers still accounts for almost ninety percent of their total.

This month, contracts at Detroit’s newspapers are expiring, and here’s what the company says is its final offer to its workers.

They are demanding a 12 percent wage cut, followed by a wage freeze for two years. So, if you were making a thousand dollars a week, that will be cut to $880 dollars for the same work.

What’s more, workers will have to pay more for health care and perhaps get less coverage. After weeks of negotiation, the company is refusing to budge. The unions have scheduled a ratification vote for Halloween. In the old days, something like this would have almost guaranteed a strike. But don’t expect one now.

The unions went on strike fifteen years ago, when they were much larger and stronger, but were badly beaten. What will happen is that these papers are likely to get even weaker. Good people will leave, for other professions if not other jobs in journalism.

One solid, thirty-year veteran journalist told me she’ll retire before working under such a contract. The real losers, of course will be the citizens. Newspapers are still the only media than can cover communities on a daily basis. Now, there’s bound to be less of that.